The invention will be described, herein, with respect to a spot color printer utilized with a black and white printer to prepare printed output in accordance with the requirement of the data stream to be printed. The invention however is applicable to any type of peripheral device as will become apparent.
Spot color printers may be utilized with black and white printers to place highlight colors at various locations on the printed document. Such arrangements can be used in any application but might be particularly useful with high speed printers which produce production jobs such as, for example, the monthly billings of a utility company. The print server to run the job is located in a computer, which may be a large mainframe, sending a data stream to a control unit connected to one or more high speed black and white printers. With a spot color printer located to receive the output of the high speed printer, highlight colors may be added to the document. One such spot color printer for use in the environment described above is an ink-jet based printer with eight printheads. Each printhead is capable of printing in a 10.16 mm (0.4 inch) width, consequently, the device is a spot printer that adds color to the printed sheet but is not capable of printing color over the entire sheet. The eight printheads must be positioned so that they can provide the desired color over a swath of a desired size, thus enabling the user to highlight, for example, their corporation logo and highlight certain other information such as, for example, the amount due and the due date. Perhaps a third color swath on the sheet may highlight some marketing information. In the particular device which will be used to illustrate the instant invention the eight printheads have the capability of providing up to three colors on one sheet. Each printhead has 96 jets to cover its 0.4 inch swath width. The number of jets utilized will depend on the setup of the machine. Less than 96 jets can be utilized, and if the desired color swath is to be greater than 0.4 inch, more than one printhead with that color may be required. Multiple colors can be included in the same swath by locating printheads with different color inks within that swath.
In setting up the spot color printer, for example, printheads with blue ink may be positioned to print a swath of blue near the top of a sheet of paper to highlight the company logo. Red printheads may print along the middle of the page where the amount due and date due are located. And perhaps a green swath is located at the bottom of the page in order to highlight some marketing material. Perhaps the blue swath at the top is 1 inch in width, the red swath in the middle is 1/2 inch in width, and the green swath is 3.2 inches minus the 11/2 inch already used. Color may not appear on any other position on the sheet and red will not appear in any place except in the designated 1/2 inch.
The problem addressed by this invention is the problem of assuring that the spot color printer is correctly set up in order to run the production job properly. Jobs which are being run at high speed for several days at a time produce volumes of printed output, and it is essential that the setup be correct. Such jobs may run night and day and over weekends when only relatively unskilled operators are present. If a production run begins, for example, or a Friday afternoon and on Monday morning the printed output contains incorrect coloration for the company logo, the magnitude of the problem is apparent. The key to solving the problem is to make sure that if the job is not set up correctly, it will not run at all, and production installations printing such large jobs need absolute assurance that such protection is present.
One possible solution for the problem is to control the setup of the peripheral device by placing instructions within the data stream so that the spot color printer receives direction for its setup from the print server. Such an approach, however, has serious drawbacks in that the print server software must be reorganized to provide for the various configuration possibilities that the spot color printer can take; and the data stream is burdened with configuration data. Moreover, if the operational characteristics of the spot color printer are changed in the future, the system print server software would require revision in accordance with the new capabilities engineered into the spot color printer. Such a solution is device dependent and could not be used for any peripheral device except for the particular spot color printer for which it is designed. Every different new model of a peripheral device would require modification of the print server software as would every different kind of peripheral device.
The solution which the inventors provide herein is not tied to spot color technology or the number of print heads or any specific type of peripheral device. It is a simple and powerful solution that can be utilized for any kind of peripheral device. For example, it could be utilized with a stapling machine which might be set up to put a staple in the upper left-hand corner of every two sheets produced. The current invention provides a needed verification of that setup so that there is assurance that the stapling machine provides the staple at the correct location each two sheets.